Nothing Underneath (1985)

Original title: Sotto il vestito niente

Wyoming park ranger Bob Crane (Tom Schanley) has a sudden vision of the murder of his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring). Jessica’s working as a model in Milan, but still, Bob jumps into the next plane to Europe to perhaps save her, hoping for the whole deal having been a premonition. Bob and Jessica are twins, you understand, so twin telepathy is a thing between the two, so why not clairvoyance, too.

In Milan, there’s not a trace of his sister to be found. She simply seems to have disappeared, and nobody seems to think more about her disappearance than that she’s a model being a model. That’s not enough for Bob, of course, so he starts an investigation of his own. He also pretty quickly manages to convince police commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasence) that there’s an actual criminal case to investigate here. And this even before more models of Jessica’s acquaintance get murdered and/or disappear.

A model-based mid-80s giallo shouldn’t really be my cup of tea, threatening the dreaded mix of pure sleaze and boring modelling scenes (nearly as boring as underwater scenes in most movies), but Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath turns out to be a pretty great giallo from the late phase of the genre I often feel empty of anything deserving even the word “good”.

The film of course isn’t sleaze free, but Vanzina does manage to hit the sweet spot where the titillation doesn’t harm the rest of the movie – some of it is even pretty important to the plot – but there’s enough on screen to sell the film through it. The handful of modelling sequences aren’t superfluous filler either, but indeed part of the plot and so get a pass from me, too.

Of course, not mishandling these aspects doesn’t make a film necessarily a good one, it just provides it with the opportunity to be one. The director does grip this opportunity pretty hard, though, presenting a giallo that is – if you can overlook or better yet enjoy the very silly set-up – actually pretty effective as a mystery, setting up Bob’s investigation so that he is always involved in something fun and interesting that also provides clues to the life and death of his sister.

The climax does of course descend back into classic giallo madness, but it does so with a lot of style, a reveal that probably was pretty surprising in 1985 (and might read as offensive to some today, but then what doesn’t), and the kind of macabre craziness at least I am bound to enjoy.

On the way to the climax, Nothing Underneath (a title meant ironically, by the way, even if it sounds pretty softcore) sets some stylishly staged murders, and quite a few side characters for Bob to interact with. Bob, as is tradition, isn’t a terribly interesting guy, so the film uses him as a foil for the rest of the cast, and in that role, he’s really rather effective. And then there’s the film’s secret weapon: beloved Donald Pleasence in his Italian phase, when he brought class and quite a number of different ironic looks to all kinds of continental European movies that probably should have been below his dignity. Pleasence appears to have a whale of a time with his Italian accent, his smartarse dialogue (yes, the dialogue is often pretty good here, too, quite against the rules of the giallo), even giving Danesi quite a different body language to many of his usual characters, including quite a bit of very un-British touching of shoulders. That the cop is neither unlikeable nor an idiot nor the killer is another interesting change for the genre, but then the script (by the director, his brother Enrico Vanzina and Franco Ferrini) really does seem quite a bit more interested in what’s underneath the surface of its characters than many films of the genre.

In the case of Nothing Underneath, this approach works very well, turning it into a film that’s really good at doing all the things you want and expect from a giallo, but also diverging from them in way that enrich instead of weaken it.